[Haskell-cafe] What happens if you get hit by a bus?

[Steve Schafer]

On Fri, 16 Dec 2011 11:17:20 -0500, Brian Hurt <bhurt at spnz.org> wrote:

>I think the "truck-factor" implications of the programming language as
>dwarfed by the implications of everything else in the project.  Any project
>of any significant size is going to have a huge amount of project-specific
>information tucked up inside the programmers head.  It doesn't matter if
>there are a million other programmers who know the language you used, or
>only a dozen- if you're the only one who knows how things were done, and
>more importantly, why they were done that way, and you get hit by a truck,
>then your boss has a big problem.  Whether there are millions of candidate
>replacement programmers, or only dozens, none of them had the
>project-specific knowledge you had.  Finding a replacement who knows the
>language is the least of his problems.

I believe that you're absolutely right. I also believe that corporate
decision makers rarely, if ever, think that way. And that's the problem:
You have to deal with the perception, not the reality.

So, that's the real question that needs to be answered: How do you deal
with the _perception_ that hiring a Haskell developer instead of a
Rails, etc. developer will result in more chaos when said developer is
hit by a bus?

-Steve Schafer